“Jesus.”
“The president made a televised speech last night, and right after, the power went out. Cell phone coverage became intermittent. The internet too jammed up to use. By this afternoon, there were really no functioning lines of communication, not even satellite radio, and the violence was pandemic.”
The man looked away from Jack as gunshots rang out in a neighborhood across the street.
“Why is it happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The power went out before any consensus was reached. They think it’s some virus, but beyond that. . .”
Dee said, “Do you know how you were injured?”
“What?”
“I’m a doctor. Maybe I can help—”
“I need to find my family.”
Jack saw the man look into their car, and he thought he was going to ask for a ride, wondering how he would tell him no, but then the man turned suddenly and limped off down the road.
There were lights on inside, but no customers, no cashier. He swiped his credit card through the scanner, waiting for authorization as he studied the ghost town and listened over the dwindling telephones in his head for the threat of approaching cars.
All but super premium had run dry. He stood in the cold pumping twenty-three and a half gallons into the Discovery’s tank and thinking how he’d meant to bring the red plastic container that held the lawnmower gas.
As he screwed the gas cap on, three pickup trucks roared by, pushing ninety down Lomas. Jack didn’t wait for a receipt.
Another mile and I-25 materialized beyond some dealerships, cars backed up from the onramps on either side of the overpass. Streams of red light winding north through the city, streams of white light crawling south.
Jack said, “Doesn’t look like they’re getting anywhere, does it?”
He veered into the left lane and streaked under the overpass at sixty miles per hour, his right ear improving, beginning to pick up the guttural sounds of the straining engine and the whimperings of Cole.
A blur of citylight, the Wells Fargo building glowing green in the distance. They shot three miles through downtown and Old Town, past Tingley Park, and then across the Rio Grande into darkness again, the western edge of the city without power.
“You have blood coming out of your ear, Jack.”
He wiped the side of his face.
Naomi said, “Are you hurt, Dad?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Comfort your brother.”
They drove north along the river. Across the water, a great fire was consuming a neighborhood of affluent homes, their immense frames visible amid the flames. Jack said under his breath, “Where the fuck is the military?”
Dee saw the lights first—a cluster of them a couple miles up the road.
“Jack.”
“I see them.”
He killed the headlights and braked, crossed the yellow line into the other lane, then dropped down off the shoulder onto the desert. The Discovery’s cornerlamps barely lit the way, showing only ten feet of the desert floor as Jack negotiated between shrubs and sagebrush and skirted the edge of a serpentine arroyo.
The hardpan reached the broken pavement. Jack pulled back onto the highway and turned out the cornerlamps. Some distance to the south, the roadblock they’d detoured at the intersection of 48 and 550 stood out in the dark—cones of light blazing into the night.
They rode north without headlights, cold desert air streaming in through the jagged windowglass. Jack’s eyes were adjusting to the starlight, so that he could just discern the white wisps of reflective paint that framed the highway. Their city fell away behind them, a mosaic of darkness and light and four distinct fires that burned visibly from a distance of twenty miles.
An hour north, on the Zia Reservation, they met with a car heading south, its taillights instantly firing, Jack watching in the rearview mirror as it spun around in the highway and started after them. He accelerated, but the car quickly closed on their bumper. Its lightbar throwing shivers of blue and red through the fractured glass of the Discovery’s windows.
The officer’s boots scraped the pavement as he approached the Land Rover, his sidearm drawn and paired with a Mag-Lite. He sidled up to Jack’s lowered window and pointed a revolver at his head.
“You armed, sir?”
Jack had to turn his right ear to the man so he could hear, blinking against the sharp light. “I have a Forty-five in my lap.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just keep your hands on the steering wheel.” The state police officer shined his light into the backseat, said, “Jesus.” He holstered his gun. “You folks all right?”
“Not especially,” Jack said.
“Somebody shot your car up pretty good.”
“Yes sir.”
“You coming from Albuquerque?”
“We are.”
“How are things there?”
“Terrible. What do you hear? We’ve been checking our car radio, but it’s all static.”
“I hear I’ve lost officers up on the northwest plateau, but I don’t know that for certain. I been told of roadblocks, widespread home invasions. A National Guard unit getting slaughtered, but it’s all rumors. Things came apart so fast, you know?” The officer pulled off his wool hat. He scratched his bald dome, tugged at the tufts of gray that flared out above his ears and ringed his skull. “Where you headed?”
“We don’t know yet,” Jack said.
“Well, I’d get off the highway. Least for the night. I been chased and shot at by several vehicles. They couldn’t catch my Crown Vic, but they’d probably run you down no problem.”
“We’ll do that.”
“You say you have a Forty-five?”
“Yes sir.”
“Comfortable with it?”
“I used to deer hunt with my father, but it’s been years since I’ve even shot a gun.”
The officer’s eyes cut to the backseat, his face brightening. He waved and Jack glanced back, saw Cole sit up and look through the glass. He lowered Cole’s window.
“How you doing there, buddy? You look like a real brave boy to me. Is that right?”
Cole just stared.
“What’s your name?”
Jack couldn’t hear his son answer, but the officer reached his gloved hand through the window.
“Good to meet you, Cole.” He turned back to Jack. “Hunker down someplace safe for the night. You ain’t a pretty sight.”
“My wife’s a doctor. She’ll patch me up.”
The officer lingered at his window, staring off into the emptiness all around them—starlit desert and the scabrous profile of a distant mountain range, pitch black against the navy sky. “What do you make of it?” he said.
“Of what?”
“Whatever this is that’s happening. What we’re doing to ourselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“You think this is the end?”
“Sort of feels that way tonight, doesn’t it?”
The officer rapped his knuckles on the Discovery’s roof. “Stay safe, folks.”
Ten miles on, Jack left the highway. He crossed a cattle guard, and drove 2.8 miles over a washboarded, runoff-rutted wreck of a road until the outcropping of house-size rocks loomed straight ahead in the windshield. He pulled behind a boulder, so that even with the lights on, their Land Rover would be completely hidden from the highway. Shifted into park. Killed the engine. Dead quiet in this high desert. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around in his seat so he could see his children.
“You know what we’re going to do?” he said. “When this is all over?”
“What?” Cole asked.
“I’m taking you kids back to Los Barriles.”
“Where?”
“You remember, buddy. That little town on the Sea of Cortez, where we stayed over Christmas a couple years ago? Well, when this is over, we’re going back for a month. Maybe two.”
He loo
ked at Dee, at Naomi and Cole.
Exhaustion. Fear.
The overhead dome light cut out. Jack could feel the car listing in the wind, bits of dust and dirt and sand slamming into the metal like microscopic ball bearings.
Cole said, “Remember that sandcastle we built?”
Jack smiled in the darkness. They’d opened presents and gone out to the white-sand beach and spent all day, the four of them, building a castle with three-foot walls and a deep moat, wet sand dribbled over the towers and spires to resemble rotten and eroded stone.
“That sucked,” Naomi said. “Remember what happened?”
A storm had blown in that afternoon over Baja as the tide was coming in. When a rod of lightning touched the sea a quarter mile out, the Colcloughs had screamed and raced back to their bungalow as the rain poured down and the black clouds detonated. Jack had glanced back as they scrambled over the dunes, glimpsed their sandcastle rebuffing its first decent wave, the moat filling with saltwater.
“Do you think the waves knocked it down?” Cole said.
“No, it’s still standing.”
“Don’t speak to your brother that way. No, Cole, it wouldn’t have lasted the night.”
“But it was a big castle.”
“I know, but the tide’s a powerful force.”
“We walked out there the next morning, Cole,” Dee said. “Remember what we saw?”
“Smooth sand.”
“Like we hadn’t even been there,” Naomi said.
“We were there,” Jack said, and he pulled the key out of the ignition. “That was a great day.”
“That was a stupid day,” Naomi said. “What’s the point of building a sandcastle if you can’t watch it get destroyed?”
Jack could hear in her voice that she didn’t mean it. Just trying to push whatever button she thought he’d left unguarded. Under different circumstances, it would’ve pissed him off, but not tonight.
He said, “Well, it wasn’t stupid to me, Na. That was one of my favorite days. One of the best of my life.”
Jack unlocked the shotgun. He found a good-size rock and smashed out the tail- and brake- and reverse lights. Unloaded everything from the cargo area and picked the glass slivers out of the carpet and knocked the remaining glass out of the back window, the rear right panel, the front passenger window. The army-green paint of the front passenger door and the back hatch bore several bulletholes. A round had even punctured the leather of Jack’s headrest, a white puff of stuffing mushroomed out of the exit hole.
Jack had folded the backseat down. Naomi and Cole slept in their down bags in the car. It was after 1:00 a.m., and he sat against a boulder. Dee’s headlamp was shining in his eyes as she wiped the right side of his face with an iodine prep pad. She used plastic tweezers from the first aid kit to dig the glass shrapnel out of his face.
“Here comes a big one,” she said.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
The shard clinked into the small aluminum tray, and when she’d removed all the glass she could see, she dabbed away the blood with a fresh iodine pad.
“Does this need stitches?” he asked.
“No. How’s the left ear?”
“What?”
“How’s the left ear?”
“What?”
“How’s the—”
He smiled.
“Fuck you. Let’s dress that hand.”
They inflated the Therm-a-Rests and crawled into their sleeping bags and lay on the desert floor under the stars.
Jack heard Dee crying.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“Kiernan.” Jack had known about Dee’s lover almost from the inception of their affair—she’d been honest with him from the beginning, and on some level he respected her for that—but this was the first time he’d spoken the man’s name.
“That wasn’t him,” she said. “He’s a decent man.”
“You loved him.”
She nodded, a sob slipping out.
“I’m sorry, Dee.”
The wind kicked up. They faced each other to escape the clouds of dust.
“I’m scared, Jack.”
“We’ll keep heading north. Maybe it’s better in Colorado.”
In the intermittent moments of stillness when the wind died away, Jack stared up into the sky and watched the stars fall and the imperceptible migration of the Milky Way. He kept thinking how strange it felt to be lying beside his wife again. He’d been sleeping in the guestroom the last two months. They’d lied to the kids, told them it was because of his snoring, having promised each other they’d handle the dissolution of their family with grace and discretion.
Dee finally slept. He tried to close his eyes but his mind wouldn’t stop. His ear throbbed and the scorched nerve endings flared under the barrel-shaped blister across the fingers of his left hand.
* * * * *
COYOTES woke him, a pack trotting across the desert half a mile away. Dee’s head rested in the crook of his arm, and he managed to extricate himself without rousing her. He sat up. His sleeping bag was glazed with dew. The desert the color of blued steel in the predawn. He wondered how long he’d slept—an hour? Three? His hand no longer burned but he still couldn’t hear a thing out of his left ear except a lonely, hollow sound like wind blowing across an open bottle top. He unzipped his bag and got up. He slipped his socked feet into unlaced trail shoes and walked over to the Land Rover. Stood at the glassless back hatch watching his children sleep as the light strengthened all around him.
They were packed and on the road before the sun came up, pressing north, the morning air whipping through the broken windows. For breakfast, they passed around a bag of stale tortilla chips and a jug of water that had chilled almost to freezing in the night. Eighty miles through Indian country—sagebrush and pinion and long vistas and deserted trading posts and buttes that flushed when first struck by sunlight and a ridiculous casino at seven thousand feet in the middle of nothing on the Apache res. The two towns they blazed through on the northwest plateau stood perhaps too quiet for eight-thirty on a Friday morning, like Christmas and everyone indoors, but nothing else seemed wrong.
Jack said, “Give me your BlackBerry, Na.”
“Why? There’s no signal.”
“I want it fully charged in case we get one.”
She handed it up between the seats.
“I’m really worried about you, Na,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t been able to send a text in two days. I can’t imagine the withdrawal you’re going through.”
Jack saw Dee smile.
“You’re such a retard, Dad.”
They climbed through high desert as the road followed the course of a river. Dee turned on the radio, let it seek the AM dial—nothing but static—and FM landed just one station, an NPR affiliate out of southwest Colorado that had diverged markedly from its standard programming. A young man read names and addresses over the airwaves.
Jack slammed the palm of his hand into the radio.
The volume spiked, the station changed, the car filled with blaring static.
Twenty miles ahead, out of a valley tucked into the juniper-covered foothills, reams of smoke lifted into the blue October sky.
When the kids were younger, they had vacationed in this tourist town—ski trips after Christmas, autumn driving tours to see the aspen leaves, the long holiday weekends that framed their summers.
“Let’s not go through there,” Dee said.
A few miles ahead, everything appeared to be burning.
“I think we should try to get through,” he said. “This is a good route. Not too many people live in these mountains.”
Powerlines had been cut down to block the business route, forcing Jack to detour up Main Avenue, and when they turned into the historic district, Dee said, “Je
sus.” Everything smoking, getting ready to burn or burning or burned already. Broken glass on the street. Fire hydrants launching arcs of white spray. Tendrils of black smoke seething through the door- and window-frames of the hotel where they used to stay—a redbrick relic from the mining era. Two blocks down the smoke thickened enough to blot out the sky. Orange fire raged through the exploded third-floor windows of an apartment building, and the canopies of the red oaks that lined the sidewalks flamed like torches.
“Unbelievable,” Dee said.
The kids stared out their windows, speechless.
Jack’s eyes burned.
He said, “We’re getting a lot of smoke in here.”
The windows blew out of a luxury Hummer on the next block. Flames engulfed it.
“Go faster, Jack.”
Cole started coughing.
Dee looked back between the front seats. “Pull your shirt over your mouth and breathe through it. Both of you.”
“Are you doing it too, Mama?”
“Yes.”
“What about Daddy?”
“He will if he can. He needs his hands to drive right now.”
They passed through a wall of smoke, the world outside the windows grayish white, all things obscured. They rolled through an intersection under dark traffic signals.
“Look out, Jack.”
“I see it.”
He steered around a FedEx truck that had been abandoned in the middle of the street, its left turn signal still blinking, though at half-speed, like a heart with barely any beat left in it. Cole coughed again.
They emerged from the smoke.
Jack slowed the car, said, “Close your eyes, kids.”
Cole through his shirt: “Why?”
“Because I told you to.”
“What is it?”